I have a user that whenever she tries to open mail preferences it consistently locks up with the pinwheel icon and requires her to force quit mail. Mac mail was fine until a gmail account was added to her list of accounts.

Aside from the prefs issue, Mac mail runs fine. She has 10.8.2 installed. When she called Apple, they suggested reinstalling the OS by using the recover option at bootup.

Is there a trick we can do at the terminal, finder or elsewhere to fix mail? The same issue exists in safe boot.

Does mail have a way to easily reset preferences while retaining the accounts configured and rules.

3 Answers
3

Go to ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Preferences and move the file com.apple.mail.plist to the Desktop and restart Mail.

Other plist files exist in ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/ but I'd start with the above plist first. In this directory you could also manually remove the offending account (particularly if the mail is also stored online) and re-add it.

Thanks. Will these remove her accounts or rules if I remove com.apple.mail.plist?
–
JamesSep 25 '12 at 13:15

Possibly, but if you move it (rather than remove it) and it turns out it does, then you can close Mail and copy back the backup plist (overwriting the newly generated one). So there's no harm in trying.
–
CraftyThumberOct 6 '12 at 18:17

We ended up deleting the accounts.plist file in ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData to solve the issue. This caused us to have to re-add all the mail accounts, but the rules, smart mailboxes, and mailboxes on the mac came back automatically.

So you followed a given answer, rewrote it and accepted it. Good form...
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CraftyThumberOct 6 '12 at 18:18

I will give you the answer. It's pretty close. The user had a million rules and local mailbox folders and it would've taken too long to set it up from scratch. Removing com.apple.mail.plist didn't seem to do anything in one of my tests.
–
JamesOct 8 '12 at 12:17